CNN had a problem... President Donald Trump helped solve it

Here’s a look inside the strange symbiosis between TV boss Jeff Zucker and the US president he helped create, with Jonathan Mahler.

At 3.58pm on a recent Wednesday afternoon in Washington, the largest control room of the CNN news channel was mostly empty, but for a handful of producers hunched over control panels and, hovering behind them, a short, barrel-shaped man in a dark pinstriped suit: the president of CNN Worldwide, Jeff Zucker.

Jeff Zuckler.

It was two minutes until airtime for The Lead With Jake Tapper, and Tapper’s featured guest was the President Trump counsellor and noted CNN adversary Kellyanne Conway.

White House advisor Kellyanne Conway.

Tapper’s opening line, a lightly self-deprecating reference to Donald Trump’s latest howler — “President Trump says the media doesn’t report terrorist attacks. Wait, I thought he watched a lot of cable news?” — brought a smile to Zucker’s face.

He was soon laughing out loud as Tapper unspooled a few more one-liners before introducing the main event: “Joining me now live from the White House, counsellor to the president, Kellyanne Conway.”

Zucker, now 51, became the executive producer of NBC’s Today show at the age of 26 and eventually took over the entire network. Along the way, he survived two bouts of colon cancer and Bell’s palsy, was blamed for killing quality television and has been accused of enabling the rise of Trump.

But he still loves TV. And he especially loves the adrenaline rush of producing live television.

“Stay on your doubles!” Zucker said to the director. “Stay, stay.”

Tapper had just shown a montage of various CNN correspondents covering a number of the very terrorist attacks that Trump claimed the media hadn’t reported and had asked Conway to explain the contradiction.

Zucker didn’t want the director to abandon the split screen and zoom in on Conway — and thus miss Tapper’s facial expressions as she tried to respond. While Conway spoke, CNN trolled the Trump administration with a chyron (the text at the bottom of the television screen): “CNN EXTENSIVELY COVERED MANY ATTACKS ON WH LIST.”

CNN’s Washington bureau chief, Sam Feist, told Zucker that the interview had been going for six minutes, the length they agreed to with the White House.

“Fine,” Zucker said. “Go 12.”

CNN’s communications director, Lauren Pratapas, who happened to be in the control room, had an idea. She fed it to Zucker, who instantly repeated it to a producer: “Does she consider us fake news?”

“Are we fake news, Kellyanne?” Tapper asked seconds later.

“Is CNN fake news?”

“I don’t think CNN is fake news,” Conway replied. A new chyron soon appeared on screen: “CONWAY: I DON’T THINK CNN IS FAKE NEWS.”

Zucker’s instincts about Tapper’s facial expressions were right: His look of wry disbelief instantly became an internet meme.

CNN made its debut on June 1, 1980, and has been transmitting news pretty much every minute of every day since then. The network’s riveting coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 established the potential power of 24-hour news.

By the end of the 1990s it had lost its monopoly on the cable-news business. CNN’s original mission was to “make the news the star”, but this was not enough to guarantee an audience now that Fox News, with its decidedly non-neutral take, was an option.

CNN still made plenty of money; the majority of its revenue comes not from advertising but from the fees cable providers pay to include it in their basic packages.

But an existential threat was looming. In a world where cable cutters were consuming their news in bite-size portions on their phones, how much longer would anyone be willing to pay for expensive cable packages? Real breaking-news events happened only every so often, and people lost interest in them quickly.

But then along came a presidential candidate who was a human breaking-news event.

CNN has become more central to the US domestic and global conversation than at any point in the network’s history since the first Gulf War.

And the man who is presiding over this historic moment at CNN happens to be the same one who was in some part responsible for Trump’s political career.

It was Zucker who, as president of NBC Entertainment, broadcast The Apprentice at a time when Trump was little more than an overextended real estate promoter.

That show, more than anything, reversed Trump’s fortunes. And it was Zucker who, as president of CNN since 2013, broadcast the procession of made-for-TV events — the always news-making interviews; rallies and debates — that helped turn Trump into the Republican front-runner.

And as it turns out, the only thing better than having Trump on your network is having him attack it. Far from hurting CNN, Trump’s war against it has amounted to a form of product placement, giving its anchors and correspondents starring roles in the ongoing political drama.

Zucker has not shied away from the conflict, which has been reassuring to his staff. “I hate to sound like a fanboy, but he’s the best boss I’ve ever had,” Tapper, a former senior White House correspondent at ABC News, told me.

It has also been good for business. Last year, CNN’s average daytime audience was up more than 50%, and its prime-time audience 70%. The network earned nearly $1 billion; it was the most profitable year in CNN’s history.

Ratings are up again this year, which is expected to be more profitable still. And CNN’s newfound relevance may not be fully monetised until a few years from now, when its parent company, Turner Broadcasting System, renegotiates subscription fees with a variety of cable providers.

In the 1960s, the vice president for audience measurement at NBC developed the theory of the “least-objectionable programme,” which held that most TV watchers were looking less for something that they wanted to watch, than for something that didn’t offend them.

For years, this theory governed programming decisions at all of the networks. But by the time Zucker left Today to take over as president of NBC Entertainment in 2001, it was beginning to feel outdated. People just had too many choices now. The economics of the business were also changing. It was becoming too expensive to produce sitcoms and dramas with ensemble casts.

About two years into Zucker’s tenure, the producer Mark Burnett walked into his office on the NBC lot in Burbank, California, with a possible solution: A new reality-TV show called The Apprentice, in which a group of contestants would compete for a job with Trump.

Trump wasn’t at the pitch meeting for The Apprentice, and it was unclear if he would even return for the second season. But after watching the rough cuts a few months later, Zucker and his top reality-TV executive, Jeff Gaspin, could see that the scenes of Trump sitting in judgment inside the ersatz boardroom that NBC had built for him inside Trump Tower were the best part of the show.

“Everything was just the catalyst for the boardroom,” Gaspin recalls. “The rest of it was pretty standard contestant dynamics, but the boardroom was tense and really engaging.” Trump became the star of the show.

If there were any lingering doubts, The Apprentice proved that the era of the “least-objectionable programme” was over. In fact, the one thing audiences didn’t want was neutral programming. They wanted intrigue, cattiness, chaos, and winner-take-all battles for survival.

Before long, Zucker was introducing Trump to advertisers as the man who saved NBC. But Zucker saved Trump, too. He had been through four bankruptcies at this point. And yet, in just a few years’ time, Trump would be dreaming of leveraging his new celebrity into a bid for the White House.

Last spring, as Trump was steaming toward the Republican nomination, Zucker ran into him in the men’s room in the network’s Washington bureau. Trump was powdering his face before an interview.

“You think any of this would have happened without The Apprentice?” Trump asked.

“Nope,” Zucker answered.

One challenge of running for the US presidency without ever having put forward a policy proposal, is that you don’t have a natural constituency of talking heads to champion your candidacy. This is a problem — not only for the aspiring politician, but also for cable-news networks, which rely on choreographed panel debates to provide inexpensive, lively programming.

Anchor Anderson Cooper.

In the summer of 2015, after appearing on Anderson Cooper’s show, Trump complained to CNN that his interviews on the network were always followed by conversations among panelists who all seemed to hate him. CNN asked Trump to suggest the names of some people who would defend him. One of those he mentioned was Jeffrey Lord.

Jeffrey Lord, who was hired by CNN at Donald Trump’s prompting.

Trump and Lord first met two years earlier, in 2013. Lord was living with his elderly mother in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A former White House associate director for political affairs in the Reagan administration, he dabbled in radio and TV political commentary and had written pieces about Trump for the right-wing magazine The American Spectator.

The magazine asked Lord to introduce Trump at a dinner at a hotel in Washington. Soon after that, Trump called Lord and proposed that they fly to Washington together on his plane.

Lord made his CNN debut in July 2015. Two weeks later, CNN offered him a job as the network’s first pro-Trump contributor. (CNN said it was already considering Lord and that Trump’s suggestion had no effect on their decision to hire him.) Today, he is one of 12 Trump partisans on CNN’s payroll.

CNN’s Last-Supper-size panels have become a hallmark of its political coverage. Many of the network’s most memorable moments during the US presidential campaign were protracted faceoffs among paid partisans.

Lord was often involved, typically with his anti-Trump sparring partner, Van Jones, another CNN employee. One night when Trump was under fire for failing to immediately denounce David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Lord rallied to his defence with a kamikaze historical attack, calling the KKK “the military arm, the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party.”

Jones, who is black, responded with an impassioned dressing-down: “I don’t care how they voted 50 years ago. I care about who they killed.”

Arguments like this were reminiscent of the head-to-head battles pioneered a decade ago by ESPN’s daytime talk shows like First Take.

Zucker is a big sports fan and from the early days of the campaign had spoken at editorial meetings about wanting to incorporate elements of ESPN’s programming into CNN’s election coverage.

“The idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way,” he told me. Trump, the trash-talking underdog who inspired raw feelings among supporters and detractors alike, was the ideal subject for this narrative framework.

Zucker lives close to Trump Tower in Manhattan, and three of his four children still attend the same Upper West Side private school as Trump’s youngest son, Barron.

“I like Donald,” Zucker told me, before quickly correcting himself. “I guess I shouldn’t call him that. I like President Trump. He’s affable. He’s funny.” He paused, searching for another adjective.

“He’s good company?” I suggested.

“He’s good company,” Zucker agreed. (The White House declined to comment on the record for this article.) Trump outlasted Zucker, who was fired after Comcast purchased NBC Universal in 2011.

By the time Zucker’s name came up for the CNN job in 2012, both he and the 24-hour news network seemed to some people like relics of a different era. One of those who lobbied on his behalf was Trump. He sang Zucker’s praises to Turner Broadcasting System’s chief executive at the time, Phil Kent, who was in charge of hiring for the position.

Zucker and Trump spoke every month or so during the Republican primaries. CNN’s anchors did some of the toughest interviews with Trump, who would sometimes call Zucker afterward to complain.

After securing the nomination, though, Trump made the calculation that he would be better off simply turning against certain media outlets. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, carried the message to Zucker in June. Kushner told Zucker over the phone that in the future, Trump would be doing interviews with only friendly outlets.

Zucker said that he thought this was a mistake. He suggested that Kushner speak to one of his contributors, the former Barack Obama campaign official David Axelrod, whose research for Obama showed that CNN’s viewers represent a key voting bloc. “You can’t win without us,” Zucker said.

For Zucker, the thick-skinned TV executive, it was just business. For Trump, the thin-skinned TV star and now approval-craving politician, it was tactical but also personal: He believed that he had gotten Zucker his job at CNN and that the network’s increasingly aggressive coverage of him was an act of betrayal.

Trump actually didn’t play a meaningful role in Zucker’s hiring. (“The president is certainly entitled to believe whatever he likes about our conversation,” Kent wrote me in an email, “however, it was not a factor in the decision to hire Jeff.”)

But after the second presidential debate in October, when several CNN panelists criticised Trump for dismissing his comments about grabbing women by the genitals as “locker-room talk,” Zucker received an email from Trump, via his campaign spokeswoman, Hope Hicks: “Jeff — Too bad you (CNN) couldn’t be honest with how well I did in the debate.

The dumbest thing I ever did was get you the job at CNN — you are the most disloyal person. Just remember, I always seem to find a way to get even. Best wishes, Donald J Trump.”

For a network that had self-consciously emulated the drama-ratcheting techniques of sports programming, the US election could not have concluded in more fitting fashion than with the underdog Trump defying the oddsmakers.

Zucker, running CNN’s coverage from the Washington control room on election night, kept the network’s cameras trained on the anchor John King as he worked the Magic Wall — the large touch-screen map that has been the centrepiece of CNN’s election-night coverage since 2008 — pointing, tapping and sweeping his way through the biggest upset in American political history. Back home in New York a few days later, Zucker called Trump to congratulate him.

“I thought I needed CNN to win,” the president-elect said.

“Imagine how much you would have won by if you had been on CNN,” Zucker replied.

Later that month, Zucker was invited to Trump Tower for a meeting that Trump called with TV news anchors and executives. It was pitched as a kind of rapprochement, but Trump instead used the occasion to berate his guests.

He called out CNN in particular, accusing it of dishonest reporting. “He was attacking CNN, but in a little more of a playful way, because he knew me,” Zucker says. “He was being an ass but in a playful way.”

The men last spoke a few nights before Christmas. The president-elect was at home in Trump Tower watching CNN. Earlier that day, he tweeted that he would have run a different campaign and done even better in the election if the outcome were determined by popular vote.

Brianna Keilar, sitting in for Wolf Blitzer, asked Rebecca Berg, a reporter for RealClearPolitics and a political analyst for CNN, what she made of Trump’s fixation on the election results. She described it as “a little bit unseemly, unflattering.”

Trump vented to Zucker one final time. “He completely trashed her for two minutes,” Zucker recalls, “says, ‘OK, got it?’ and then hung up.”

Trump has only stepped up his attacks on CNN since then, and has even publicly taunted Zucker, telling the network’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, on live TV to “ask Jeff Zucker how he got his job.”

In February, Zucker commissioned a survey of the public’s perception of CNN. Zucker reviewed the report on a recent morning with the network’s senior staff members and audience-research team.

Few people had been swayed by Trump’s criticisms. If they considered CNN a trustworthy source of news beforehand, they most likely still did; if they considered it unreliable or biased, that probably hadn’t changed either.

What had changed was that people on both sides had stronger feelings about CNN. “We actually have a personality now that people either hate or love, whereas we used to be a little more milquetoast in their minds,” one member of the research team told Zucker.

It was another way of saying that CNN is no longer neutral programming. There’s an obvious correlation between this transformation and CNN’s recent success. It’s not what’s least objectionable that people want, it’s what’s most objectionable.

During the Republican National Convention last summer in Cleveland, Trump called Lord on his cellphone while he was on live with Cooper in CNN’s studio in the convention hall. Lord paused to take the call and then reported on their conversation on the air.

“Anderson, I’ve just heard from Donald Trump himself,” he said. “He thinks that this convention has been a tremendous convention. He has a message for you, Anderson: He is not pleased. He thinks that we’re not accurately representing this convention.”

Lord moved on to Trump’s one indisputable claim: “He specifically said to say that your ratings, our ratings at CNN here, are up because of his presence in this convention. And I think I’ve more or less delivered the message.”

After he finished the segment, Lord left CNN’s studio and bumped into Zucker, sitting in the convention hallway in a golf cart. “I said, ‘I guess you didn’t see this, but Trump called me on air,’” Lord recalled.

“He jumps off the cart, and I tell him the whole story.”

Zucker had only one question. “The very first thing he said is, ‘You didn’t use an expletive on the air, did you?’ I said no. Then he grabs me by the lapels and says, ‘That is great television!’”

• Jonathan Mahler is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Adapted from an article that originally appeared in The New York Times Magazine.